And you know what the funny thing is? I want Trump to succeed in damaging FISA ( if only a little bit - everyone knows at this point it is not going anywhere; ****, just the other day I heard prosecutor defending Guantanamo as a great way to gather intelligence so we are back to that level of idiocy ).

I don't think that this is directly about FISA itself. The process is flawed, but it's probably the best one we could use, given the nature of the issue at hand. The problem is that if false information is fed to the judges in the FISA court, they're going to approve taps that they should not. That's really no different than a police investigation providing false evidence to a judge to get a warrant. That happens too. And the failing isn't the judge, but the investigators not being diligent in their fact finding (or sometimes outright faking evidence to get a warrant, which is straight up abuse of power).

When these things happen, the correct course of action is to investigate those who generated the false evidence, find out who was involved, and then apply appropriate punishment for those actions. And this is *exactly* what folks on the Right want to see happen. Again, this is not specifically about Trump. This sort of thing could have been used against anyone. I would hope that we would all like to see this sort of abuse rooted out and eliminated. The last thing we should be doing is sitting around saying "Well, I don't like the guy they used this on, so I guess it's ok". No, it's not. Because if this sort of thing is allowed to stand unpunished, it'll happen again. And in all likelihood it wont be someone you dislike who will be the next target.

Again. it's not about Trump. We should all expect that the same rules of law and protection against abuse of power, apply to all of us, not just the people we like.

*shrug* Secret courts making secret decisions about super duper secret things are not being honest? Color me aghast with shock and disbelief at the audacity of the spook society to only let dirty civilian judges see only what they think they need to know. It is not like Clapper lied with impunity, right?. Is there some sort of magic difference between congress and secret court?

Frankly, if there is one good thing about Trump, it is that he happened to shine light on this particular light averse power center.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.

Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Mr. Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the officials said.

If anyone still thinks the House investigation is legitimate (not just this but also Nunes' leaks of classified info, various other attacks, joke "memo", etc), they're either blindly partisan or just smoking veterinary pharmaceuticals. That's the only two options.

If anyone still thinks the House investigation is legitimate (not just this but also Nunes' leaks of classified info, various other attacks, joke "memo", etc), they're either blindly partisan or just smoking veterinary pharmaceuticals. That's the only two options

What about those of us that are just really cynical?

Them finding evidence of corruption and unethical behavior is about as surprising to me as walking into a men's restroom and finding a urinal. Yes, true, they're not in every men's restroom, but you shouldn't be acting all excited to everyone when you see one there. Finding evidence of corruption among politicians and other higher-ups in Washington sounds about as equally impressive of a feat.

If anyone still thinks the House investigation is legitimate (not just this but also Nunes' leaks of classified info, various other attacks, joke "memo", etc), they're either blindly partisan or just smoking veterinary pharmaceuticals. That's the only two options

The process is flawed, but it's probably the best one we could use, given the nature of the issue at hand.

*shrug* Secret courts making secret decisions about super duper secret things are not being honest? Color me aghast with shock and disbelief at the audacity of the spook society to only let dirty civilian judges see only what they think they need to know.

The alternative which existed prior to the creation of this "secret court", was to just trust the intelligence agencies to only spy on people for legitimate national security reasons. Again, it's not perfect, but it's far far better than what we had before. And given the fact that this involves decisions about surveillance which is, by its nature, secret, means that you can't exactly have open public discussion.

There has to be some kind of balance between the need for secrecy and the need to ensure that our national security apparatus is not used in abusive ways. The basic concept of the FISA court is not bad. And in this case, as I said in my previous post, the failing was not with the court itself, but with what appears to be deliberately misleading if not just outright incorrect information fed to it. Presenting information obtained from the Steele dossier, without mentioning that it was generated via opposition research by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC would be bad enough. Providing a News source (yahoo news) as corroborating evidence to that contained within the Steele dossier, without mentioning that the Yahoo News story was, in fact, the result of portions of the same dossier provided to them by Steele himself, just doubles down on the problem.

Had the FBI done just a bit of digging, they would have discovered this and discounted Steele as a legitimate source. In fact, they did finally do this, but only after yet another media outlet (Mother Jones) wrote an article including data they got from Steele on the same subject (spreading the same information to multiple media outlets does not make them each count as different sources btw, and is precisely why the FBI disallows sources who shop their information to media outlets). This clearly invalidated the original source and the secondary source (since they were really the same single source). Um... But despite this, the FBI continued to rubber stamp renewals of the same FISA warrant surveillance for another year.

It's hard to read about this stuff and not come to the conclusion that there were some folks in the FBI who had clearly "picked sides". The contrast between the lackluster pursuit of information in the Clinton investigation and the nearly rabid pursuit of anything and everything anywhere near the orbit of Trump is just hard to ignore. At the end of the day, if you have an organization like the FBI engaged in this sort of partisan operation, you're going to have problems. I'm not sure what other safeguards we could have had in place to prevent this. Normally, you'd expect someone at the agency would have blown the whistle, but given that it's beginning to look like the top level of the DoJ was on board with all of this as well, it may very well have been that people just kept their heads down because they didn't want to get "in trouble". Given that the broad assumption was that Clinton would win the election, this is not really that surprising. Who do you blow the whistle to? When the party in charge is the same as the party behind the folks doing all of this, and is likely to be the party in power in 6 months or so when the media winds die down and it comes to review time? No one. You pretend you don't see anything and keep your head down. Sad, but true.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.

Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Mr. Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the officials said.

If anyone still thinks the House investigation is legitimate (not just this but also Nunes' leaks of classified info, various other attacks, joke "memo", etc), they're either blindly partisan or just smoking veterinary pharmaceuticals. That's the only two options.

Burr later denied the Times report, telling a CNN reporter that his panel had not concluded that House Republicans were behind the leak. He also denied raising concerns about Nunes during his meeting with Ryan.

Who to believe? "two congressional officials briefed on the matter" (who are unnamed in the Time's article)? Or the named reporter with direct quotes from the Senator himself? Hmmm...

Hey. I'm not saying that leaks don't fly akimbo in scenarios like this, but let's not pretend this is a one-sided thing, and let's not point fingers and pretend to be shocked and outraged, especially when the "facts" aren't as clear as they seem.

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.

If anyone still thinks the House investigation is legitimate (not just this but also Nunes' leaks of classified info, various other attacks, joke "memo", etc), they're either blindly partisan or just smoking veterinary pharmaceuticals. That's the only two options

Last week, I saw a guy with an eyepatch and a gold monocle and pointed him out to Flea as one of the most awesome things I've seen, ever. If I had an eyepatch and a gold monocle, I'd always dress up as Mr. Peanut but with a hook hand and a parrot.

trump also said "take the guns first and then due process" which, other than contradicting due process, is what the right always claimed Obama would, eventually, theoretically, do.

Edited, Mar 4th 2018 7:32pm by Debalic

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publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.